Ok all. I’ve never done one of these before, and I didn’t plan to do one for this trip, so this may end up: a) unfinished, b) boring, c) text heavy-we don’t post pictures of the kids online
If you’ll bear with me, I’ll give this a shot and we’ll see what happens:
Preface (text heavy):
December 2018. That’s the last trip we took to actually be in Disney. 2018!! That wasn’t the plan, but that’s how things ended up. Like so many others our Disney plans were upended by Covid.
The original plans:
Sometime in spring 2019 my mother floated the idea of a Disney cruise to celebrate her 70th birthday. Naturally, we were all in! We scoured the planning sites and our calendars and decided on a July 2020 cruise to celebrate her birthday in September. Avoids school issues and fewer hurricanes. A 5-night double-dipper on the Dream. July 5-10. Since we would have to be in Florida ahead of the cruise, and that was July 4th weekend we decided to go in a few days early and spend July 1-5 at the Wilderness Lodge. I was so excited. We always stayed at Fort Wilderness when I was a kid. We drove down from NH lin our station wagon, towing our pop-up camper. We’d stay for two weeks and take things nice and slow. We hung out at river country, harassed the baby ducks, and cut our feet up on all those shells. It was a glorious way to be a Disney Kid.
Unfortunately, Covid mucked up all our plans. We sadly watched the parks close and cruise after cruise get canceled until ours was too. We were glad to have the Future Cruise Credit, but sad that all our awesome plans went to waste. We rescheduled our cruise to February school break 2021. And waited, fingers crossed, hoping that would work out. Spoiler: It didn’t. So we moved again to February 2022. We changed up our group a bit. My sister and I would both have new babies in 2021, and my niece and her daughter said they wouldn’t be able to go after all. We still had 17 people, just a different breakdown.
So when we looked at the February 2022 options, and how much FCC we had, we decided (my mom who paid for nearly everything decided) that we should go concierge. The FCC covered almost all of difference in the cost, and who wouldn’t enjoy concierge? Another spoiler: Concierge is amazing.
So the new plans were set. A couple nights at Boardwalk (you don’t want to plan to fly in the night before from the northeast in February and have your flights canceled and miss your cruise). Then head to the port for our cruise. Then a couple of nights at Kidani before heading home. It’s a lot to squeeze into one week of school break, especially when we decided to drive from MA instead of fly.
The crew:
Me
DW
DS9
DD4
DD8m
There’s a whole lot of other people too. A dozen more. Generally, if I need to refer to them, I’ll try to use their initials and age.
I promise at least one picture in the next post…
If you’ll bear with me, I’ll give this a shot and we’ll see what happens:
Preface (text heavy):
December 2018. That’s the last trip we took to actually be in Disney. 2018!! That wasn’t the plan, but that’s how things ended up. Like so many others our Disney plans were upended by Covid.
The original plans:
Sometime in spring 2019 my mother floated the idea of a Disney cruise to celebrate her 70th birthday. Naturally, we were all in! We scoured the planning sites and our calendars and decided on a July 2020 cruise to celebrate her birthday in September. Avoids school issues and fewer hurricanes. A 5-night double-dipper on the Dream. July 5-10. Since we would have to be in Florida ahead of the cruise, and that was July 4th weekend we decided to go in a few days early and spend July 1-5 at the Wilderness Lodge. I was so excited. We always stayed at Fort Wilderness when I was a kid. We drove down from NH lin our station wagon, towing our pop-up camper. We’d stay for two weeks and take things nice and slow. We hung out at river country, harassed the baby ducks, and cut our feet up on all those shells. It was a glorious way to be a Disney Kid.
Unfortunately, Covid mucked up all our plans. We sadly watched the parks close and cruise after cruise get canceled until ours was too. We were glad to have the Future Cruise Credit, but sad that all our awesome plans went to waste. We rescheduled our cruise to February school break 2021. And waited, fingers crossed, hoping that would work out. Spoiler: It didn’t. So we moved again to February 2022. We changed up our group a bit. My sister and I would both have new babies in 2021, and my niece and her daughter said they wouldn’t be able to go after all. We still had 17 people, just a different breakdown.
So when we looked at the February 2022 options, and how much FCC we had, we decided (my mom who paid for nearly everything decided) that we should go concierge. The FCC covered almost all of difference in the cost, and who wouldn’t enjoy concierge? Another spoiler: Concierge is amazing.
So the new plans were set. A couple nights at Boardwalk (you don’t want to plan to fly in the night before from the northeast in February and have your flights canceled and miss your cruise). Then head to the port for our cruise. Then a couple of nights at Kidani before heading home. It’s a lot to squeeze into one week of school break, especially when we decided to drive from MA instead of fly.
The crew:
Me
DW
DS9
DD4
DD8m
There’s a whole lot of other people too. A dozen more. Generally, if I need to refer to them, I’ll try to use their initials and age.
I promise at least one picture in the next post…
